When Gerry’s Music Shop first opened in 1946, it was a small shop on Main Street in Holyoke, run by local band leader Gerry Lamothe. It was in 1974 that South Hadley’s Norm Provost — who first started taking clarinet lessons at the shop at 14 years old — took over the business with his wife, Ann.
In the early days, the store worked with a handful of schools in the area, ensuring their students had access to high-quality instruments. When Norm’s son, Jim, began working for the business in 1991, he was visiting about six schools a day, three days a week. Seven years later, he was visiting 120 schools per week. Today, that number has continued to expand; a map of the region hangs on Provost’s office wall, pins showing the location of schools across Massachusetts and Connecticut.
“Involvement in music is a lifelong journey,” said Jim Provost, who now owns the store with his wife, Mandy. He said the store likes to say it builds musicians “one note at a time.” And as Gerry’s celebrates its 75th year in business, he said it has been built “one teacher at a time, one student at a time, one district at a time.”
The history of Gerry’s Music over the past three-quarters of a century charts the history of the music business — the ups and downs mirroring those other businesses have faced.
In particular, the past few years have been challenging for Gerry’s Music, as they have been for nearly all local businesses.
Some 70% of the company’s business is done through the schools, so when the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered in-person learning, that business disappeared overnight. So, too, did the more than 200 students who came in for lessons every week.
But the business was up for the challenge. Mandy said that they pivoted their own operations online, holding their usual instrument rental nights there and uploading a series of videos introducing each instrument to students. They also set up barriers in their in-person lesson rooms, requiring masks.
“Contact with a musician is what they really wanted,” Mandy said.
Gerry’s has now built back its lesson business, making its teachers employees of the store when previously they weren’t.
But the owners stressed that although some parts of the business have changed, as their stylish website makes obvious, the most important part as stayed the same.
“This business is so reliant on the relationship you have with the customer, with the family,” Mandy said.
Jim Provost said that as the business has become a musical destination across New England, they’ve worked to keep those relationships front and center. Moving forward, they hope to continue to offer high-quality instrument repair services in an era when too often objects are made to be disposable. And they are also training their family in how to run the business.
“We’re trying to nurture that next generation so we can be here for a lifetime of music makers,” Provost said.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.